Saturday, 11 June 2016

Social Construction Is Not Epistemology

Comment thread at Ketagalan Media here on the subject of racism. There are two important things to note.

First, that Calin Brown's redefinition of "racism" serves the twin purpose of stigmatizing one racial group of people and the institutions they purportedly control as "racist" whilst at the same time excluding the bad behaviour of other racial groups from the same stigmatic category of "racism". As such her "definition" of racism is wholly a political weapon and not, as "definition" would suggest, an instrument of knowledge.

Second, the attempt to defend her redefinition of racism by reference to social construction is, when followed to its' logical conclusion, a denial of human knowledge. If concepts such as racism are social constructions with no independent existence, then it would seem to follow that our other concepts (including that very concept of social construction itself) are also social constructions that likewise have no independent existence. This is in effect, the denial of human contact with and knowledge of reality.